Category: development

Almost off for summer vacation, we’d like to leave this survey for those of you interested in Movie Pulse. We love to hear how we can improve the app.

We’ve outlined several ideas for additional features in the survey and we are really curious what do you think. No matter if you are new to Movie Pulse or if you are a regular “recorder”. So, come on: spend less than 5 minutes.

Like this:

Recording your heart rate with Movie Pulse will no longer affect your activity rings! Finally! It has been tricky but simple at the end. Thanks to the users who urged me to focus on this . It has been a malfunction which Apple Watch users don’t like: mess their workouts and calories. One sentence as an excuse: Many apps faced this problem and even Cardiogram just recently removed it with an update.

At second, records will now no longer be sent to the Watch multiple times. It has been thought as a security net, not to loose data, but … I implemented it the wrong way. Until now!

Besides this, implementing Open Movie Database required an update to get access to their movie entries (for which I pay a monthly donation btw.) So, all users of Movie Pulse must update to version 1.5 to specify their recorded movies via OMDb! Otherwise the search for a movie title will fail.

In case something else goes wrong, please leave a comment, send me a mail or use the bug report below.

Sadly enough: new bug found

While I am writing this post, it seems the update has not only eliminated bugs: a new one arrived. The recorded heart rate will now and then be sampled at an unpredictable frequency, causing hilarious curves. I’m afraid version 1.5 is somehow useless at present. Sorry, but I will do further investigation.

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Searching a movie in OMDb has become a change, therefore looking for a movie inside “Movie Pulse” will now be much easier:

select the release year of the movie you are looking for

pick from matches of movie titles

The improved and fine-tuned OMDb search will help finding the right movie – nevertheless it requires the knowledge of the year the movie went into cinema the first time! If in doubt I recommend checking the release year at IMDb. I also removed a bug which caused the reinstallation of the default movie while no internet connection is available.

Please always save not stored records before updating to a new version!

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To all Movie Pulse users: please don’t touch the stop button twice in a short interval. I experienced a time-lag of the interface which affected me to do so. This caused a second recording which will delete the previous one. This affects the current version 1.0.

There might be other required usability improvements or even bugs. Therefore I have prepared a bug-report. Thank you for making this app better. I will work on a improved version.

Tell about this:

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Developing such thing as Movie Pulse came to my mind quite early this year. And just before summer I registered the app and domain. The purpose of the app has always been very clear, straight forward: watch a movie, record your heart rate, store the movie along with a descriptive visualization of what happened to you in terms of positive stress.

And of course this came to mind of other scientists – one example is this work analyzing 50 male students watching “The Silence of the Lambs” see page 35 ff., Induction of emotional arousal in laboratory experiments by Michael Myrtek in “Heart and Emotion: Ambulatory Monitoring Studies in Everyday Life”.

But this would be different: a small everyday device will be the companion and do the work.